Bonsai
by Elliptic Eye
Summary: One, two, three: This never happened.


Bonsai

He's got his hand in her hair, where it always used to go first. She's got her hand under his jumper, and that's new, covered in question marks, hardly subtle. Nice to know that that much has carried over, at least.

"Where is she?" Peri asks against his lips.

"Who?" he mutters back, moving from her mouth to the pulse point at her neck. She's got her eyes open; but, then, so does he.

"She. He. Whoever it is." There's no accusation in her voice, and when she gets her hand under his shirt tail and runs her nails over his ribs, it's not to hurt him (yet). It's just that she knows: He never travels alone.

He's silent for a moment, considering while he works at her throat and plunders through her hair. "She's safe," he says eventually.

* * *

It's not time that's relative; it's events.

* * *

Peri runs her hand up his thigh—

No, scratch that; Peri runs her mouth up his thigh—

No, scratch that; Peri pushes him down her body because he owes her—

No, it couldn't have happened like that;

circumstances plainly dictate

that he's already got her hands secured to the headboard.

* * *

One, two, three. _I'm coming back for you._ No, no; he doesn't think like that. He's never thought like that even for Susan, so it isn't possible here. One, two, three. Of course, this body is different—from the last, from the others. This is the time for him to decide what he's growing into. Consistency has a higher value this go-around; a merry go-around it is, too, and the Valeyard caught the brass ring. Consistency, in fact, is the only thing accounting for his existence now. One, two, three. Blast. He's oversimplifying again; this isn't self-preservation alone. He _does_ have a duty. To Ace. To home. To Time. To the Matrix. And he has a creeping suspicion that the TARDIS is more than a little responsible for the shape of his brain in this body, because deficiency in the nanites' programming is the only explanation for what happened in the last. One, two, three.

Damn. Scissors again.

* * *

He'd tie her hands to the headboard, if they were using a bed. Instead he pushes her into the wall—good, sturdy, middle-galactic period architecture, not one piece of which came from Thoros Alpha. He's even forgotten his umbrella behind him, he's pressing forward so hard, trying to bury himself in every part of her at once.

It's all changed, Peri thinks, just before his hand comes and scatters the thought like bread crumbs before birds. He wants her. He used to need her so badly that he couldn't want her.

"Why are you here?" she whispers in his ear. Then she pulls his head down and around to get her mouth into the space between his ear and his curls, so he'll know she doesn't want an answer. He gasps something alien in a Scottish accent and hauls her hips against his. _God._ So long. Hard even through cloth—she'd forgotten what he felt like. It's one thing about him that is exactly as it used to be, and she doesn't care if it does make her an idiot, she wants him.

"I had a dream," he says softly into her hair as he works steadily at getting her belt out and she attacks his fly, "about six months ago, relative time."

"Was I in it?"

"Yes." His fingers skim down her thighs and take her knickers with them. Amazing, that he can do that so lightly when it's happening this fast. "We were making love, and fistfuls of feathers came away in my hands."

Then he pushes her flat, and he kisses her as her body opens around him.

* * *

"Back in two ticks, Ace," he says mysteriously, and taps the brolly's red plastic handle against his nose.

Ace laughs, other hands already combing her back into the tangle on the dance floor. "Two or maybe three, right, Professor?" she shouts back. She's much cleverer than Peri.

"Oh, yes!" He smiles and raises his voice over the hubbub. "Three at the most!"

* * *

"_Doctor_," she whispers as she screws her eyes shut and swings herself atop him. She doesn't ask about who's with him, because for her to do that he'd have to let her talk, and as soon as she's got his name out he's plunged his tongue into her mouth to shut her up.

She shudders when he surges up into her and his arms close over her back. Just like always, then.

* * *

Gallifrey. Peri has never been to Gallifrey. Yet Peri is in the Matrix, and the Matrix is on Gallifrey.

Something else is on Gallifrey, too.

He's got a flip-flop thing. He went out and got it after Coal Hill; it had been too long since he'd had one. It's good to have it around as a reminder.

"Sequential logic's output," Mel had recited once in a supermarket, "unlike that of combinational logic, depends not only on the input at that instant, but also on the past output states of the sequence."

Three flips back:

* * *

"_Déjà vu_," he says, as he lets her do what she likes with him and plays again with her hair. "Peri, do you have a feeling this might have happened before?"

His jumper's balled up on the floor nearby. She's trying to get his fly open, but her hands are shaking too badly to manage it and she's about ready to cry from frustration. "Of _course_ it's happened before," she says, and she can feel her lip trembling in spite of herself—

Only, of course she doesn't say that;

She says, "I knew I'd see you again";

No, no; _flip_;

She says, "I thought I'd never see you again." Yes, that's more likely. He can get away with that.

* * *

How much can he get away with? That's the real question. The flip-flop thing is too narrow and contained to tell him.

* * *

Whoever it is who isn't there is still there. Peri knows. She knows him, she's never forgotten; she's never forgotten how he used to look at her in puzzlement until he'd recognize her and his eyes would clear, or how his fingers used to catch and wrap around any available part of her, or how he used his whole hand the time he tried to kill her or the way she'd kept remembering it all through the first time he had her until she came so hard he panicked; and most of all she's never forgotten being chained to the rock at the end, and she knows that he never travels alone. He makes _side trips_ alone. He _executes missions_ alone. He even takes holidays alone, but only to seek out company; he does not travel alone. She knows there must be someone and she always knew that there would be. She doesn't want it any other way, either. Peri knows firsthand how much he needs somebody to be there, and how little it matters who it is.

"Oh—" Warm, wet tongue on her ribs, just under her breast. He's moving all wrong. It's fast, and fevered, and a little bit desperate, and if it were _her_ Doctor it would be all right, but he's so much more certain now and it's scary to see him like this.

Down, skimming over her belly, his fingers twisting up into her body. Scary—

"Iliac crest," he mutters as his mouth drags over her hips. "Mons venus—"

"Doctor?" She whimpers. "Doctor, what's—"

Scary. He wrests her knees apart like he can't get her open fast enough. When his mouth closes on her, she finally works out what's off: It's _hot_, God, he's warm, so warm, all wrong for him, and she remembers the rock like she's been doing all through this—scary—scary—

He penetrates her with his tongue. She comes blindingly hard, and this time it's she who panics.

He has a reason for being here. That much she knows. Unfortunately, she will never find out what it is, because she will never have had that thought.

One, two, three:

* * *

The Matrix can be changed. Dirty little secret, that, and everybody has been so sure for so long that the Matrix _means_ the truth that nobody's quite sure what happens to the rest of the universe when you change the Matrix.

The Doctor isn't going to find out, either.

You can't remember something that never happened. That's what memory means. Memory has a definite relationship to time, even for a Time Lord. The TARDIS, however, remembers all kinds of things that never happened: That's what being a TARDIS means.

My favorite sentence in the fic. Also the most important one, probably.

_The Persistence of Memory_, by Salvador Dalí. Salvador: _salvator_, -_oris_, Latin, a savior or preserver. The one thing he knows in this incarnation is what he's got to do.

* * *

Her nails split his skin down his back. They've done the catch-up and they've found his room and they've got all the most up-to-date uniforms off, and _now_ she's ready to hurt him.

"I remember us on the rock," Peri says, and she knows from his eyes that he remembers, too. There goes that theory, then.

"Do you know what I remember about it?" He presses his lips together primly as he surges forward and slams her against the headboard again, but he doesn't look away. "I remember your _arm_ under my _head_ and your fingers on my face and your voice going on and _on_," she says through her teeth, because now, oh, yes, now she's ready to hurt him. She clenches her fingers into his shoulders and hisses, "Get it out of my head, Doctor. _Fuck me_."

And he does—

* * *

No, he decides on further reflection. He needs to remember that.

One, two, three:

* * *

He's sitting—_sitting!_—in the Alphan throne solemnly, with the hordes clamoring at the gates and the TARDIS in the corner, a promise of safety. A cool, blue, alien promise of safety, a much better one than Yrcanos.

"I need you to explain it to me, Peri," he says seriously, and if he doesn't stop doing that while she's sitting in his lap and kissing desperately at his neck, it's going to have a serious impact on her self-esteem.

She makes a noise of frustration and kicks at the chair. "_Damn_ it," she swears, "this used to work to shut you up—"

His fingers catch in her hair, and it's the tenderness that stops her cold. He's got the red-handled brolly in the other hand and he's smiling at her sadly. "I need you to tell me how they put you to rights, Peri, or else it can't have happened."

"Oh, Doctor, does it _matter_?" she wails. "It happened, didn't it?"

"Are you sure?" he says, eyes glittering. "Are you quite, quite sure?"

Yes, Doctor, I am quite, quite sure; for I'm here, aren't I—

* * *

_I tried to fix it, Peri_. No, that's a lie.

_I'm trying to fix it, Peri_. No, that's a lie as well.

_I'll try to fix it, Peri_. No.

_I wish I could fix it, Peri_. Yes, that's him down to the ground.

* * *

"Need you," he gasps. "Still need you—"

She cries out as he buries himself inside her. He doesn't, though. Need her, that is. She knows he doesn't because if he did he'd take her with him and she knows without asking that he never will, or else he'd have the TARDIS in sight.

* * *

Flip, flop, flip. Nothing for it. It takes time to see the effects of a cut, which really is the point of the whole exercise. And does he trust his judgment enough to do it? Yes. Yes, this time around, he does.

To every Ω-consistent recursive class _c_ of formulae there correspond recursive class-signs _r_, such that neither _v_ Gen _r_ nor Neg (_v_ Gen _r_) belongs to Flg (_c_) where _v_ is the free variable of _r_.

There exists a statement which is true but has no proof.

This sentence is false.

Three ticks back: _This never happened._


End file.
